Armrha's Journal

P != NP

2010-08-11T16:31:11Z

Big news this Sunday was a paper released that claims to be a serious proof on the P = NP problem. Big enough to bring me out of livejournal limbo for at least a day. It's a draft paper by Vinay Deolalikar, and I think it's been pulled for the moment while they are addressing some typographic errors and some incorrect methods in the paper, but its yet to been definitively shot down.

A Proof that P != NP

Here's an update from today with some of the various issues with the paper.

Issues with the Proof

Either way, this is really interesting news. It's one of the Millennium Prize Problems, each of which have a 1 million USD reward for solving, but the implications of solving these very difficult problems are even more interesting. The last one solved was the Poincaré conjecture, which was solved by the angry genius Grigoriy Perelman, who still remains disenchanted with the mathematics community. Perelman turned down the million dollar prize. Also, a Fields medal.

A proof that P != NP is not quite as world changing as the other way around. If it's true, the most immediate consequence will probably be cryptographers around the world going out for beers in celebration.

amazing

2009-10-01T18:54:50Z

this bear video is amazing.

Writer's Block: Do Not Open Until 2059

2009-08-03T19:12:13Z

You people are all insipid nitwits.

1) Do you think they will not have a bible around in 50 years? Given that it's the most widely republished book in the world, it's safe to say that in 50 years the KJV will still be around and unaltered.

2) Newspaper: Newspapers are not printed on archival quality paper, but are still an okay choice. But still, libraries keep records of newspapers going back a long, long time. They will likely be able to dig up whatever newspaper you put in there anyway.

3) There is no reason to put in a DVD of any sort, including any of these anime, manga, comedy films, 'Super Troopers', or really any other popular media that you think for some reason needs to be preserved in a time capsule. And especially not backed up with a flash drive. For one, why would we suspect DVDs or USB are going to be a relevant medium 50 years from now? Neither is even close to 50 years old right now. Museums and specialists are still going to have them in half a century, but they are going to be mighty dissappointed to read your carefully burned DVD and find... 'Super Troopers', a film that will certainly be maintained in the vaults of the producer well after 50 years. Just disgusting. Don't you have anything more to your personality than the types of media you like to consume?

I think the most reasonable replies are the photos, journals, etc. Things that will put together a picture of life as it was 50 years ago for an individual. Though I have no doubt 50 years from now we'll have no shortage of data on the way people lived their life now (hell, just keeping a record of the livejournal archives would be enough for anyone studying half a century ago to put a lot of stuff together), many different sources and stories would be good for posterity.

holdren, 'Ecoscience', population control

2009-08-03T18:55:43Z

I'm shocked and a little confused at the insane conservative backlash about John P. Holdren, Obama's "science czar" and this textbook, Ecoscience.

The book details some rather grotesque methods that population might be brought under control in a crisis. Nobody is denying that the strategies and techniques inside it are terrible things. But the entire outrage seems to ignore the entire reason these strategies are proposed -- a crisis of enormous overpopulation, mass starvation, famine, disease.

Is the problem one of imagination? Can people not imagine a scenario where these things are happening? I mean, if you had quizzed me on the street about what the government should do if population has raced out of control and people were starving on the streets, disease running rampant, I would have probably suggested similar measures, starting with the least extreme and moving up to the most extreme. In a survival situation, your rights go out the window, no matter who you are.

It's crystal clear if you reduce the situation from a country-perspective and to a personal perspective. Assume you are on a vessel of some sort, and you are the last people in the world. The supplies are running out, and the ship that could support 20 people indefinitely now can only support 15 indefinitely -- if 5 stay, they are going to cause the oxygen to run out and everyone to die.

I think even hardcore conservatives in this situation would agree; 5 people have to die in order for the rest to survive. I find it hard to believe anyone would justify the end of the human race in order to avoid making a difficult moral decision. Even in the face of oblivion, we have to be ready for the hard decisions. The conservative outrage against this text seems to be outrage at the concept of government ending up having to make these decisions.

I understand how disturbing that might sound, but a government is just a group of people in charge of regulating and directing activity at a national level. In the survival scenario above, there's a small government in the decision-making processes that lead to selecting the 5 to die. You might argue that the government is incapable of properly executing extreme strategies; You might say they are unfit to decide when it is time to execute them, and I'd agree with you -- It's difficult to accept that kind of power in somebody else's hands. But honestly we can't say that envisioning such strategies is not necessary or warranted.

Or is it that people don't believe such situations can occur? This seems short sighted to me too. I have heard the Quiverfull people talk about how 'The Earth will provide' etc, but no reasonable person can assume there are not limits to what the ecosphere. Everything we know about the science involved in our energy supplies shows us there is an upper limit, even if we are not there. The earth is like a giant vessel, hurtling through space, and if we have more people that can be sustained, everyone is threatened. The textbook notes this, talks about things that could be done to bring population back into control, and then clearly states that such extreme measures should be avoided if AT ALL possible. Of course they should. The extreme measures provide the counterpoint to the 'keep the population under control in the first place' argument; If you don't want the extreme measures, take steps to keep from forcing the hand.

I guess I feel there's a mental divide in a lot of conservative heads on 'personal' issues and 'national' issues. For me, too, it's hard to imagine any situation or problem in my personal life to become a problem to millions of people -- I can't even imagine a million people. But I have to acknowledge that they do exist, and that government regulation of population would have to be preferable to the government refusing to intercede in 'personal affairs' and going through famine and the inevitable destabilization that would cause. I mean, the average person is only at most 72 hours without food away from thinking a can of wet dog food is utterly delicious. How many hours does it take before other people start looking tasty, comically parodied in cartoons with two folks on a deserted island? Can anyone honestly say they'd prefer roving bands of cannibals over government supported sterilization programs?

I understand the Catholics outrage toward it, they eschew all forms of birth control as awful. But heck.

Governments already enact some measures to control population: The US has tax breaks to people with children, which are in place supposedly to support growth even if it's just the power of the voting majority holding it in place these days. China has tax penalties to people who have more then a couple children, in theory causing the population to shrink. It's the same kind of thing; Governments regulate these kind of things all the time.

Another thing is people keep labeling the book as 'supporting eugenics' and calling Holdren (and by association Obama) 'hardcore eugenicists', as seen in the Amazon.com top user review for 'Ecoscience'. This is wrong; Eugenics is the process of selective breeding in human populations in order to decrease the frequency of traits viewed as negative and increase the frequency of traits viewed as positive. Nothing in any publication of Holdren's espouses such a view. Population control in Holdren's context has nothing to do with genetic manipulation. I can only assume the association is to make people think Holdren is a totalitarian hell-bent on world domination, and to bring up associations with Hitler -- which is despicable pandering to their audience. Holdren's views are not in line with Hitler's at all. Anyway, any conservatives on my friends list, please tell me about the big deal here. If you are uncomfortable with any administration making such decisions in the advent of a population crisis, what is the alternative other than wide-spread famine?

Data recovered!

2009-07-14T21:23:16Z

I have recovered 100% of the lost data.

Misery.

2009-07-14T08:20:17Z

Misery is hard drive recovery. I was a stupider back then, and I should have taken every opportunity to get important data off of a raid 0 stripe. Still, I'm not going down without a fight. I've been sitting here half the night, and using an external drive enclosure, have tried orienting, spinning, and nursing the drive to a full spin and carefully monitoring copy commands. I just need 1 good copy of it and I can ditch the broken drive.

The other drive seems fine, but I'm definitely taking this opportunity to migrate off of a raid 0 stripe. I should explain what that means, I guess, though most of you probably know already.

RAID stands for redundant array of (inexpensive, or independent) disks. Essentially it lets you net yourself some reliability or extra space at various different tradeoff points. You start with 2 disks, which is what I had. Say they were both 150 gigabyte disks. Well, you could pick RAID 1 or mirroring and then you'd have 2 disks running, both with copies of your live data. This effectively protects against straight up platter damage ruining your day; Errors on 1 disk will cause that copy to fail and then you run off the live disk until you replace its pair. This is 'mirroring' and it is what I should have done.

This provides the reliability benefit and a slight performance benefit in reading, since the controller can read a large file into memory using both disks to read other parts. On the RAID 1, if the text string 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' was your data, this is what it would look like on Disk1 and Disk2:

D1: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'
D2: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'

OR, you can be greedy and go for RAID 0 -- This is what I did -- and double your space. The RAID controller will stripe each disk with a certain amount of data, maybe only 1024 bytes per stripe. So if you end up with disks looking like:

D1: 'Teqikbonfxjmsoe h aydg
D2: h uc rw o up vrtelz o.'

As you can see, with the stripe we save so much space! We can then fill up all that remaining space with all kinds of junk.

But you better not put any kind of important junk on there. Because what happens when one of these drives dies? Well, you're left with:

D1: 'Teqikbonfxjmsoe h aydg
D2: X(

And lemme tell you, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- especially when it's stuff like binaries, archives, etc, that are essentially unrecoverable without their other stripes.

Not to mention raid controllers all decide to do their own thing, proprietary setups that make it difficult to pull the data in anything but the controlled environment they want you to do it in. Yeah, we've made ways to get around most of it, but damn if it isn't inconvenient.

So on a forced write with DD, I am at 19 gigs on the fail disc so far. it's about 65 gigs of data, but this is better than the 1.6 gigs it was stuck at hours ago. Man, today has been such an awful day. I spilled my coffee before I got to take a sip, and I almost lost my arm after getting completely trapped by a piece of furniture for 45 minutes after the building had closed. (Man, long story, I don't want to get into it.)

They say patience is a virtue in cases like this. I may have to leave it writing all night. dd will just keep trying to write if you pass it the option conv=noerror, so right now I think I hjave it doing something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=2048 conv=noerror,sync,somethingelseican'tremember?. That means input file = device on bus sda, output file device on bus sdb, blocksize is 2048, do not stop on errors, copy all data sector for sector, and whatever the other option I put on there was. Whatever. It's hung, and not getting past the bad block at 19 gig. #*!#$. I need every block, so I can't run badblocks or anything and just flag bad sectors. So my options are to sit here and wait... and wait... and wait...

magisteria, or lack thereof

2009-06-08T18:44:08Z

I was reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea on the plane again, and found this wonderful bit around page 100, thought I would post it here for you guys to read:

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philospher Ronald De Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!" If you then volley back demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not down for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

Now if you want to reason about faith, then offer a reasoned ( and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other ( a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seirously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this is common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)

-Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

This articulates my feelings on the subject very beautifully. I'm tired of poorly reasoned demands to 'respect' the sanctity of religion in that fashion. Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria is total rubbish -- Science is merely the procedural application of reason & rationality, and nothing can be claimed to be 'immune' to that without stepping out of the field of relevance entirely.

swine flu news

2009-04-30T19:28:30Z

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd get more information out on the swine flu and what we've learned about it.

A summary of some of the news lineups today about the swine flu and it's effect.

Genetic information on the virus, some interview quotes from researchers.

CDC information on symptoms and risk groups (what they have so far anyway.) Things that should reassure you: There is no report of any kind of cytokine-storm like behavior in the current outbreak of swine flu

I think the tone in these articles is pretty good -- nothing like, well:

Of course, we have Dr. Henry Niman freaking out. Niman is a well known alarmist, seeming to pop up talking about SARS, Avian flu, and runs a company that thrives on virus related buzz. He also is remembered for being a big pusher for biotech stocks in the 90s. He might be correct but he sure has a lot of incentive for any given outbreak to go larger than smaller.

More alarmism here. Unsubstantiated comments from what may or may not be healthcare officials in Mexico do not a controlled study make. They're in an extremely stressful situation, too, but the blatant fearmongering in the tone of this article is just disgusting. The comments, however, are pure gold:
Eyes Open
"Time to connect some dots. Over the past two years, I’ve been noticing that jets are leaving long, persistent trails that slowly diffuse until they have the appearance of cloud cover. Jet contrailsare nothing more than ice particles that freeze at higher altitudes after leaving a jet engine. I became curious after seeing these trails that do not disperse, and which form at altitudes that seem too low for ice particles to form, much less persist for hours. Go to youtube or google video and search for “chemtrails”. Planes are crisscrossing our skies, leaving thick trails that spread out into a complete “white out”."...[continued]"
... JFK was killed by a physics defying bullet. Most of us are intellectually misdirected by the greatest of all firewall words: conspiracy. Anything out of the ordinary or contradictory to propaganda is branded as “conspiracy theory”. Somehow, suspicion directed at our government has been equated with lunacy, and the absurd cover stories and lies are taken as reality. Think for yourself, otherwise the media will do it for you.

This is a planned pandemic, a deliberate depopulation using as its instrument a man-made virus."

Laying the crazy on pretty thick in the first set of comments, we hit a chemtrail guy halfway through! I love these dudes -- chemtrails is this fantastic totally insane conspiracy theory that hundreds of thousands of people that work on airplanes somehow participate in a governmentally funded and sponsored mind-control or weather modification program to spray chemicals into the air (inexplicably) using contrails. The evidence for this is that contrails are in the sky for a while and seem to creep some people out. As Thomas says in the article above, "Anyone who doesn’t buy into the conspiracy theory is treated as an active member of that conspiracy. Conversely, anyone who signs on to “chemtrails” is embraced as a fellow traveler, no matter what their other beliefs."

I don't know what powers people to these heights of insane deduction (Jets leave trails of water vapor behind them as they move, in a well documented phenomenon. Must be a government conspiracy to control your mind!) or how they think that contrails must be the easiest method to spray these chemicals (Assuming they want to spray chemicals all over the place, and have the resources to spray enough to cover the US, why not just spray them at night? Or spray them so they don't leave trails for conspiracy theorists to gawk it and freak out on the internet about?) It reminds me of the Rainbow Aerosols lady.

Anyway, back to swine flu hysteria! House Rep (R-MN) Michelle Bachmann wonders why democrat presidents cause swine flu. For those of you not willing to suffer through the video, the quote:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

This comment is strange on a couple levels. Because as the famous vaccination picture shows, Gerald Ford was in office when we had the last big outbreak of swine flu. But why even correct that, since how can you relate whoever is in a political office to biological mutations and recombinations of flu?

This kind of relation stinks of comments regarding supernatural causation. You know the type, the people who want to prescribe everything to the influence of their deities. I can't imagine how else you would think democratic leaders could cause a plague other than divine retribution -- and that kind of mystical-causality belief scares me in an elected leader.

The CDC has a twitter line thing with more info on basic sanitation and dispelling facts. It's helpful I suppose. Just don't succumb to panic. Even if you get flu, you can get better, and the stress of assuming the world is collapsing is not going to help the process.

swine flu

2009-04-28T17:37:21Z

The media and their terrible 24 hour news cycle have locked their jaws onto this Swine Influenza that has hit this season. Anyway, just in case anyone is buying into the hype:

All deaths reported so far as in Mexico, which despite lots of growth still has a substandard health care system.

Confirmed cases in other places in North America and Europe have already gotten better after a couple days home.

It's just a normal flu. Normal flu even kills people every year. This is nothing like the Spanish Influenza pandemic. If it were the case, we would be seeing such strong and lethal symptoms in the victims. So far, it's just a flu. You get nauseated, achey, tired, etc. The flu.

The media outlets are always sharp to call out a plague (good ratings) and they would love to say this is untreatable and viciously deadly, but it seems to be pretty well treated with Tamiflu. Nobody wants to be the person who said 'don't panic' when it was an actual pandemic, but given what we know so far and the total tame nature of this flu, I'd have to say the overabundance of concern is unfounded. So if you were panicking and canceling any meeting you had with swine, calm down. It's going to be fine.

Beatrice Arthur 1922-2009

2009-04-27T08:57:03Z

Volcano

2009-03-23T07:45:30Z

Mt. Redoubt in Alaska is erupting apparently.

the mix of worlds

2009-03-04T17:54:56Z

In my last post, I basically talked about why I don't think atheists should shirk away from any debate about religion they can, if they think religion is dangerous or wasteful. The central point here that most people get upset about is the idea that you can think your beliefs are right and other people's beliefs are wrong.

I don't get the problem with that. Some people are right, and some people are wrong. What universe do you think we are living in? We make the best judgments we can about the world around us and act on them. I also don't get the bullshit people spew about how 'well, the real answer in the world is always shades of grey, not black or white.'

This is a problem where there is no shades of grey answer. A particular religion can't be 'kind of true'. Religions make hard pronouncements about the nature of reality, the existence of god, and all kinds of facts about the world we live in. Either god is as he is in the bible and christianity is right or god isn't or doesn't exist and christianity is wrong; There's no 'halfway' or 'shades of grey' there.

Of course, the 'shades of grey' exist in the myriad religions that exist -- millions, truth be told, most of which totally dead with us not even knowing the names of the parties involved -- and most of these are exclusionary; you can't believe in this religion and other religions still be true. On top of that, some people believe this preposterous notion that 'all religions are true'... despite being wholly incompatible.

This is such mindless pandering prattle that its tantamount to saying like, 'Well, all theories about the age of the earth are true' back in the early 1900s. 'Let's all be friends... all theories about quantum mechanics are true.' 'Come on, let's not pick a fight... spontaneous generation and evolution can (insert that awful 'COEXIST' bumper sticker)'.

This is *total* bullshit people. Facts, truth, reality; These aren't things that bend and sway to fit our opinions. In a world of millions of religions, not a single one of them has displayed any distinguishing piece of evidence beyond second hand stories, hearsay, and personal revelations that have been shown repeatedly to be amenable to deception. Given that deception has been proven to exist many, many times and gods, zero, it seems the most probable conclusion is that gods aren't real and our endeavors with them are a waste of time. If any god, with generally near infinite power, could produce even one piece of evidence they could easily get most of the people on the planet to believe in them... but they don't. No god even has a 50% majority in people on the planet.

Especially for a god whose stated goal is saving humanity, this seems weird. With a couple quick demonstrations, bingo, everybody on the planet can be saved. But they don't. I don't think these gods are supposed to be morons, so it just seems to be as patently ridiculous.

These aren't like simple superstitions with relatively little cost per person -- these are huge sweeping beliefs, some of which even impose taxes on every person within the organization. Maybe churches do good works -- but I can't think of a single church that couldn't have done even more good works by building hospitals instead of churches. Every giant religious organization has a huge overhead in just maintaining that organization, and this, if all the beliefs are false, is a tremendous waste of money and effort.

Individually, if all these beliefs are false, these people are laboring under false pretenses; On a quest to reach the edge of the flat world. I think to write them off as valid members of humanity is wrong; These aren't dumb people, just misled. I think like starting fights is wrong, too, you don't want to just scream at people, stress them out more.

But honest discussion -- now there's something interesting. Almost everytime, you get down to the theist just saying to you, 'Well, I don't know, at that point I just believe. It's just a matter of faith.' When pushed as to what faith is, you get to, 'Well, belief in something for no reason at all.'.

Saying something out loud like that must have a weird effect on people. If you are going to be theistic, you should at least understand how unreasonable your beliefs are: faith is by its very definition entirely unreasonable. It's kind of like the exact antithesis of science: No experimentation, no control, no history, no evidence, just FACTS.

Essentially, despite how annoying it might be, I want christians (and other religionists) to try to convert me. From their point of view, it's the logical thing to do; If they were right, then I'm in incredible peril. An eternity of torture is an awful fate that they've invented up, and if any of my loved ones would rather just see me head off to their god's torture room instead of trying to argue with me, I would be shocked. And I will talk with them -- not necessarily trying to 'convert' them to atheism (you don't convert to atheism, you just abandon your beliefs), but I just like to get to the bottom of why they do what they do. The more the merrier -- I love the debate.

return to portland

2009-03-04T08:28:37Z

Back from my trip. I had a great time.

My coworker linked me this as soon as I got to the office. It's a typical armchair commentary on atheism: Basically, assuming atheists really want to go to church and reap the 'benefits' of religion but don't because they want to be 'elitists'. My coworker, at comment #220, made the following excellent reply:

The 'noisy atheists' do so, because that is who they are. A friend of mine will tolerate belief in faeries, ufo abductions, kharma, ghosts and psychic powers about as much as any religion so don't take it personally. He doesn't do it because he wants to be a lonely elitist, he does it because he knows it is right and has the ability to tell you why. I personally have absolutely no idea how people can go to Church and pray. It's an utterly foreign concept to me. Do people take it seriously? How can they when it's so clearly a bunch of metaphors and dated societal rules. I'm not saying this because I want to attack your institutions of faith. I'm not a confrontational person, I just really have no idea how people can just bite their tongues and go along quietly with the show. It would be like *actually* believing that Santa Claus comes down chimneys on Dec 25th, or that robots from the planet Cybertron are hiding on our planet disguised as vehicles. I am a reasonable person, and I realize that the majority of religious folks are not evolution-denying, anti-heliocentric, homophobic, abortion clinic bombers. I know there are benefits to society and benefits from being in a social group. But here's what it seems to me that religious people don't understand about me: 1) I think that religion tries to "own" morality. We are perfectly capable of being good moral people without the threats and promises of religion. 2) There is no magic hole in the sky for me to escape through when I die. I have one life and that's all she wrote. I'd rather own up to the harsh reality than sugar coat things. 3) I am an optimist for the future. I think I will see a great increases in human lifespan and a continuing improvement in quality of life for all of humanity. This is the hope that tempers the terror of #2. 4) I find that the religious agenda in this country has been harmful to the progress of medicine, science, human and reproductive rights. You cannot push on anything without being pushed back as well. As far as I see it, there is no need for a big-tent or a small-tent or any tent at all. -Squid

I thought he did a great job. Too many times atheists are lumped into a clique, a club, as if we had a roster or some kind of organized religious services. Atheists come in all shapes and sizes, from people who just don't have time to think about gods and don't really care to people who are sure there are no gods to people who just don't think the evidence is conclusive towards the existence of gods.

He pointed me toward this video, a satire of, well, Christianity, positing a world where god just dissappeared. It's fairly obvious satire, though a few gems stand out ('Imagine a world where disasters strike completely at random!'). I did see this in the comments, though:

BritLeigh6264:
hilarious as always, Edward.
However, what happened to the good old days when atheist just laughed at christians and walked away.
Always trying to convince religious peoples that their belief is wrong is the same thing as overzealous religious people trying to convert everyone.
I'm an atheist, but I just keep it to myself unless someone asks why. What's the point? Christians... don't try to convert!
Atheist... stop trying to convince!

This is one of my least favourite opinions: These atheists actually irritate me more than religious people most of the times. It's the ridiculous condescension in the viewpoint: They say, essentially, 'Leave the religious to their moronic beliefs. You can just laugh at them and walk away.'.

Not even engaging in a debate, you give no chance for the truth to bubble to the surface or even be visible. These atheists think of Christians like zoo animals or something similar; I've heard 'preserve the culture' explanations to the 'let's not start a fight' explanations.

This hypothetical illustrates the point:

Imagine you have come to believe that a certain bubbling brook or water source was perfectly clean and good for people to drink. This is in no way a certainty, but to the best of your understanding and capability to reason, you believe your thoughts on this are true.

Nearby to the water source, there's a group of people drinking water that you are certain is going to harm their health or possibly seriously damage them. Despite this, they refuse to drink from the other source, as their culture doesn't permit it.

Now, the atheist like the example above would essentially say, 'Well, let them suffer. Just laugh and walk away at those morons.'

Any decent person would be bound to try to inform the group of their disagreement, particularly if they are of the opinion that the group is wrong. Now it could be disagreeable, seen as aggressive, or even dangerous to voice your opinion and the reasons for it and try to argue with theirs, but to do less would be allowing an evil to continue: These people hurting themselves for no good reason.

Of course, you could be wrong: But if we didn't trust in ourselves on important matters like this, we couldn't make any decisions at all.

I find this opinion almost everywhere, surprisingly. At least once per any widely-viewed public post about atheism he or she will step forward to decry the actions of the rest of us and act in a manner that doesn't just imply they are better than religious people, but also that religious people aren't worth arguing with. You can't get much more elitist than basically calling them all worthless.

Granted, I know often the argument seems pointless, but one thing is good: The more argument there is, the more there is for people to run into. The number of atheists in a population increases as the amount of education increases, statistically: This number is not because atheists are smarter, more educated people but because education exposes you to new ideas and there's a lot of would-be atheists out there that just haven't encountered the ideas.

And debate is always good. From the christian viewpoint, having their faith tested is supposedly a good thing: From an atheists standpoint, learning the reasons people believe in god can help you understand why they do. Anyway, going to bed for now. Night all.

armrha @ 2009-02-26T00:56:00

2009-02-26T09:18:43Z

Picking up some audiobooks for the trip, and found more ID debate:

Amazon reviews

The front page of reviews all gush at the book which proclaims that 'Darwinism' is going out the door; and that 'evolution' is just change within a species, not changing into other species.

I don't understand. This is a problem basically confined to America, and these intelligent people are dedicated to blathering on about how ID is really the correct way to go, and every single argument they argue for has nothing to do with the science of the situation. They can't open their mouth without saying things like darwinism causes Hitler, racism, its not something our children should believe in, it will eliminate morality, it will undermine our children's self esteem.

Even if every one of those things were true, it wouldn't have anything to do with the science and facts surrounding evolution. Geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, molecular biology, genetics and embryology all have facts supporting evolution. ID has no facts that go against it.

The other thing is, I don't even understand why evolution is viewed as such a threat. I mean, evolution isn't even necessarily incompatible with belief in a god. You could very well believe evolution was the mechanism some god chose to sculpt his species with; If he was a lazy programmer, I know that would be preferable other than trying to custom tailor each organism. These people act like if people thought evolution was true the world is going to catch fire.

I guess I should try to just ignore it. It's just weird. These are smart people, obviously -- yet they repeat the same tired old arguments, employ flawed logic (like the whole Hitler thing) and when cornered refuse to learn anything about the science, claiming it is not worthwhile to learn the facts because its so obviously false. Something can come from so many different sources, pointing to the same thing, and they just want it to be false so bad that they pretend. Dawkins in 'The God Delusion' writes that people who deny evolution must be either, 'stupid, ignorant, insane, or wicked', though he said he couldn't honestly believe there were people out there who would do it just to be wicked. I agree with him entirely.

Embryology shows matching embryos across hundreds of species, almost identical methods from species to species in reproduction, genetics shows trigger genes (Hox genes) (like the eyeless gene in rabbits) that can be moved to other species and end up with expression of a whole body part via deixis within that genome pointing to the same kind of part as in the rabbit genome (flies to rabbits), paleontology establishes a fossil record showing myriad species in different configurations and even providing predictive examples, where evolutionary biologists have said 'there should be fish with this trait' around an area and then telling the paleontologists where to dig and, what do you know, they find what they expected. (Intelligent Design has never made a testable hypothesis.) Zoology shows traits shared across species from similar proteins to practically identical genes, like heme factor expressed through genes in every animal except the lamprey. (Which fits exactly with the divergence of lamprey's from our common ancestors by the molecular clock. Another confirmation). Botany reveals a world of plants exactly as we'd expect, with each species competing for light and nutrients for billions of years, with no counter cases ever discovered (in any of these fields, even), geology reveals evolution pressure in ancient earth and improves our capability at prediction and analysis of fossils and even helps locate fossils where we would expect them, and helps explain early life on the planet by an understanding of the ground conditions billions of years ago. Comparative anatomy finds thousands and thousands of species that share things like number of bones in our hand, qualities like spinal cords, teeth, plethora of identical or similar characteristics just starkly indicative of the truth of evolution shaping these species.

Yet they want to deny it, so they do, fervently. A scientific principle more solidly studied and understood than GRAVITY. (There are more things we don't understand about gravity than we don't understand about evolution -- for example, we have no clue exactly what the mechanism of generating the force on things is, just that it does... In evolution, we know the mechanisms involved. Selection, isolation, etc. We know it happens through competition for resources and via hereditary.)

I guess it's okay. Trying to explain the big bang today to somebody, I hit a similar problem. I mean, we have three big points pointing toward the big bang: After a detailed analysis of stars, we put together a way to determine the age of stars based on outputs of that stars and nearby variable stars that followed certain reliable periods. Taking that, and looking at globular clusters, which are the oldest things out there, we found the universe was 13-15 billion years old.

Looking at the expansion of the universe, after determining a reliable estimate of the rate per million light years, we traced that expansion back to the beginning and found a date around 13 billion years.

Looking at the global microwave background radiation, we correlated a even temperature in every direction of around 3 kelvin, spread out across the entire universe as we understood it. The only model it fit with was a universe that was created... thirteen point four billion years ago.

These are three unrelated ways of determining something that all came out with the same answer; If this was wrong, there would have to be something wrong with all three methods of determining. That's certainly possible, but how likely do you think it is? And if it were just mistakes in methodology, why would it all end up about the same date?

Evolution doesn't just have three points of data showing its true; It has hundreds and hundreds. But yet again, just like they want to fight an ancient universe, they want to fight evolution. It's a shame to see brilliant minds wasted fighting against the truth, for no reason other than some strange personal vendetta, some inability to lay down your arms and admit you're wrong like so many scientists have as their personal pet theories have been proven wrong.

armrha @ 2009-02-19T23:37:00

2009-02-20T07:50:07Z

I've been listening to these astronomy lectures in audiobook by James Kahler, and though it's pretty introductory stuff, no matter how many times I've heard about massive stellar bodies I can't help but just be amazed.

The fantastic violence in our universe almost offsets the amazing distances between the stars.

If you were to set up a scale model of the solar system, you could start out with a wagon wheel at the end of a football field. On the other side of the football field, you would put a marble -- that would be Earth. Four more football fields away, you would put a softball. That is Jupiter.

That frames the solar system fairly well: Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, is 275,000 more football fields away. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is 573,000 football fields away.

Already we've lost the capability to scale in football fields. The size of our galaxy, if you had to fit it in the analogy, is millions of football fields: Roughly the amount of football fields to stretch from the moon and back 977 times. (Using an astronomy analogy to explain astronomy terms... sigh.)

And this is not even a fraction of what is out there. Any section of sky we look at, no matter how small, reveals thousands of galaxies.

This is an incredibly small portion of the sky, viewed for hours, and those objects you are seeing are not stars, though it looks more populated than a dark sky. Just a less then a percent section of the sky, and it's filled not with stars but with galaxies, more distant than imaginable. The amount of earth to sun 'football fields' ceases to have any meaning: It's a number of football fields to reach across the galaxy, but they're all out there. There are more galaxies than people on the earth by a large margin. There are more stars in our galaxy then people on the earth by a large margin.

I was just listening to the tale of the death of the largest stars that actually go supernova: They burn through processes, alternating through stages of heating and compressing layers of their structure to produce almost an onion-like composition of various elements, and the eventual dead-end at iron. The material in the core fuses up to iron and can't go anywhere else; Fusion ceases, the gravitional power pushes down on the star, compressing it further until the electrons break loose from their shells. The atoms themselves are strained beyond imagining: They combine with the protons and electrons and soon all you have are neutrons, rapidly heading for each other as the star collapses in the matter of seconds. They hit: It's an unstoppable force, over solar mass colliding into the most powerful force in physics, an immovable barrier of neutron versus neutron. (Not quite immovable, but in this example.) The recoil and the intense neutrino radiation is enough to sent the outer layers of the star exploding into space at amazing speeds. Cosmic rays are high-speed particles ejected by these supernova; The largest one we have recorded had the energy of a pitched baseball.

That's a single atom with the energy of a pitched baseball.

Here is one probable cause of one of the most powerful events in the universe. A hypernova. , one of the most fascinating stars in the southern hemisphere, is four million times brighter than the sun and 100-150 solar masses. In its inevitable collapse in the near astronomical future, it will produce enough energy to read by in the middle of the night for an unknown span of time, something between three days and a year or so. If we were positioned around its rotational axis, the gamma ray burst of its explosion would likely destroy the atmosphere and most of the life on the planet. Luckily, we're not along that axis, but still. Amazing stuff.

VY Canis Majoris is the largest documented star, about the size of the orbit of Saturn. For comparison, remember the wagon wheel that is our sun in the football field analogy? This star is 20 football fields wide. High energy radiation emitted during fusion in the core of the star takes millions of years to get through the incredibly dense interior to be emitted from the surface. A beam of light traveling around the star would take over 8 hours.

(Scale of our sun vs VY Canis Majoris. From Asymptote's science blog. All other images from wikimedia commons.

In the last 10 years or so, we've discovered thousands of exoplanets. We continue to discover an incredible amount more. Planets seem to be at about every star.

There's a lot of things going on out there.

thinking about social constructs

2009-02-10T23:01:41Z

Thanks everybody for answering my poll! If you want to still answer it, it's still open. I think you all selected some of the very best reasons people give, and everybody avoided the utterly nonsensical ones.

I was reading Wikipedia the other day and came across a paragraph on the intro to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which said:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

I read Brave New World a few years ago, and thought it was much more relevant in modern life than 1984 despite any worries about wiretapping and torture we had in the country over the last few years. I had not seen it put so succinctly -- Reading over that, when I thought of 'trivial culture', images of YouTube raced across my mind.

I'm generally very anti-alarmist: I think we can respond to things as needed, adapt, and generally survive through almost anything. My only worry in regards to this idea is that it might stifle human creativity. Creativity, relevant cultural contributions, etc, are all very important and all. Glancing at the fundie boards, it's easy to see how the truth could be "drowned in a sea of irrelevance." -- these people can live the entire lives without being disillusioned of the things they believe but can't prove, and the board enabled them to find a peer group, an essential part of social interaction, that approves of that position.

The too-much-information to passivity and egoism clause is also bothersome. It's easy to lose motivation when you are so behind. I mean, you could pick any random subject, and compile a list of at least a thousand people in the world better than you pretty readily -- that is very intimidating for people trying to break into the field. I have to wonder how many times a potential scientist hovered at the brink of making a decision, either to go back to school or continue playing World of Warcraft or whatever, and opted for the latter because they felt there was no way they could impact X field.

The volume and ease of production of information causes problems too. I mean, for YouTube, for example, most of the videos are... well, terrible. Apparently if you make a medium that's easy to publish on, most people will just throw together the most hastily constructed crap. The volume gives you twenty eight million hits for any given thing, giving you plenty of stuff to look through to find a supporting position. A good example is the recent controversy over the autism-vaccine debate. It appears the guy who kicked off the scare falsified data. Parents, in true 'crank' style, seem to love the idea that they could defend their children from the 'wicked' pharmaceutical industry. These people have developed the same tactics that show up on Rapture Ready and the other crazy fundie boards.

They are immune to evidence; any evidence presented is probably just falsified by the pharmaceutical industry anyway. They cannot be wrong; attempts to point out why they are wrong or that their theory doesn't make sense results in anger and disdain toward you for possibly threatening the well-being of their children for the health of the masses. Etc...

Some vaccines do have negative effects, but autism is not caused by any vaccine. Autism has been correlated with heavier brains. This to me suggests its not a problem with vaccines, but with the pruning process that happens in the brain in the later months of gestation, a view somewhat supported by John Ratey's old book on the brain. But these people are immune to any suggestion of the sort. Hell, even the autism community: One of the comments in that is that members of the autism community has 'noticed' many cases of regression after getting the MMR shot. A totally anecdotal bit of evidence, but that's never stopped this kind of stuff from propagating. Rapture Ready also has a similar bid for their own version of the facts. All kinds of places do, from extremist organizations to sunday schools.

The denialist blog has a great list of criteria for both denialists and cranks. Cranks are a topic for another day, but the denialist elements seemed very relevant. Their list:

Conspiracy: Whenever the facts presented don't meet their expectations, someone behind the scenes has manipulated them to trick the person arguing the opposing faction and the public at large. Rapture Ready thinks Obama is the anti-christ, or a secret muslim infiltrator that plans on downing the U.S. as part of his hidden agenda, that wikipedia is authored in part by Hamas and al-Queda, any other number of conspiracies you might want to mention.

The anti-vaccine community thinks the CDC and other governmental health organizations are willing to sacrifice their child on the altar of herd immunity. And they won't let them take their baby!!

I find conspiracy is generally the last resort.

Selectivity (cherry-picking): Easy enough to see: Reports from propagandists like Ken Ham and others are revered while any contrary data is totally ignored, even if it is on the front page of the same magazine they're quoting or even within the same article. Ideals adhered to in one context are ignored in another, i.e:

'Palestine deserves to be moved from Israel because Israel is rightfully the homeland of the Jews. The Palestinians stole it centuries ago.'

and

'Native americans don't deserve the land our ancestors took from them because they couldn't keep it or didn't develop it.'

and

'You can't be held responsible for the actions of your ancestors; reparations for slavery are nonsense'.

Here, ideals are cherry picked -- the Palestinians are responsible for their ancestor's thievery even though they say you can't be held responsible for your ancestor's actions in their case -- Native Americans, despite being here first, don't get their land back even through the Jews do. (I guess the Americans taking their land forgot to yell 'No takebacksies!').

Fake experts are another problem with the 'too much information' or 'truth drowned in a sea of irrelevance' thing. The truth has less impact when the users refuse to acknowledge it: They can cite their own fake experts that support them and support their identity, so what benefit does the truth give them anyway? Anyway, the other bits are about logical fallacies (ridiculously common, from the 'true scotsman' fallacy that they give for the reason Hitler was an athiest, as this:

No true Christian would have done the things that Adolph Hitler did.

Most of the evidence shows Hitler was a believer for his early life, and conflicted near the end; Nothing suggests he was ever open atheistic. Any other speculation is just trying to guess on the internal state of Hitler. But the argument always boils down to that: Hitler couldn't possibly be Christian because no real christian would be Hitler.) to just simple ad hominem attacks to 'So many people believe X (christianity, MMR shots cause autism, etc) that it must be true!'. Etc. Rational arguing isn't important because the argument isn't about rationality or reason. I still haven't figured exactly what it is about. Anyway, I am just going to post it and deal with more later -- going to go get lunch or something.

Religion Poll

2009-02-06T07:44:35Z

View Poll: Reasons for Belief in Gods

25 Things Meme

2009-02-03T09:58:52Z

I have been tagged repeatedly for this stupid meme, but I don't really get it. I mean nobody cares if I broke my pinky when I was 14, got a sharpshooter pin for hitting a bunch of the targets in boot camp, or one shattered a glass window pane by bouncing into it repeatedly and then was extremely shocked when it shattered. Man that is just totally boring to me and I don't want to slog anyone down with having to read such irrelevant stuff. So, let's do 25 relevant things about me (and, incidentally, about you too):

25 Random Things About Me

#1: I'm a member of a particular genetic line on this planet that has the capable to discern events into discrete identifiers and tag those identifiers with related information from other events, then take that information and make conclusions based on the relationship from event to event, even over comparatively large amounts of time. Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the only animal with the capable to learn and grow like we do. For short, we'll call this sentience, or even 'sapience', which I sometimes prefer because it highlights the difference between the way intelligent animals act and humans (who are the most intelligent animal) act.

#2: I came into this mysterious capability with no warning. I didn't even exist until sometime after August 16th, 1983. I don't know exactly when: My memory, the most important contiguous part of my existence, is lacking in that area. I don't have exact memories until much, much later. The fact that I (or anyone else) can have memories at all strikes me as extremely astounding. The fact that I at some pointed started to exist is even stranger -- Thirteen point seven billion years in a blink of an eye until I'm stumbling around falling on the carpet.

#3: All other people seem to be in the exact same predicament as #2. After some work in that direction we found an extensive body of evidence giving us a rough idea of our origin as a species. The current best guess is that a single self-replicating DNA or DNA related-molecule was developed through a process of natural selection. This showed us life started as chemistry and physics, organic molecules interacting in unpredictable ways. This life was devoid of anything we might call the capabilities related in #1, our elusive 'sapience'. We are near certain that all life can be traced back to this molecule, because the structure is so particular AND present in every living organism. The intricate structure is so improbable to come about by chance that to suggest it happened once strains credibility, if not for the evidence all around us. So guessing that it happened twice, just the same way, is out of the question. All life on earth can be traced to this, the first ancestor, the first self-replicating bit of matter. Even if matter was not sourced in this way, and is even more improbably placed here by somebody else we can pretty much rely on multicellular life sharing a common ancestor -- we can trace shared genes back a long, long way. (Sometime after the earth was formed, at least 4 billion years ago)

#4: This practical robot matter had no intelligence and just reproduced itself in a way that allowed it to pass on relevant applicable traits to successive generations. This took energy constantly being projected at the surface of the earth and was able to cause more and more complex operations with it and the matter around the replicating creatures. Traits that caused replication faster flourished, others died. In these ancient critters that can't even be really called animals must have found tricks like moving around, and eventually how the meaningful application of moving around gave them such an incredible advantage. Just the ability to move may have been a fantastic advantage to reproducing critters at this stage, but the real amazing advancement was the addition of triggers of sorts that set off different kinds of behavior. Symbol bacteria with sensitive patches to make them move towards or away something -- This was a very important step. A step away from random application of energy and towards ordered application of energy, how an outside source of energy can power against entropy in a limited fashion. The ordered actors were able to outproduce the random actors in many instances, so they thrived. (Sometime after the earth was formed, at least 4 billion years ago)

#5: In a mind-bogglingly complex operation that is not understood, eventually things as complex as cells came about. The eukaryotic cell is a machine so complicated that it makes me personally incredulous about how it could be the product of these random operations, but that doesn't make me buy into any mystical explanation any more than I think David Copperfield really made the Statue of Liberty disappear. The fact is they exist, and the only way we have seen life demonstrate an increase in complexity is through evolution by natural selection, so it must have worked its way up somehow. Perhaps the different parts evolved in different ways and came together by chance, or perhaps some parts captured the other parts. Mitochondria to be later exploited in multicellular animals are certainly hitchhikers, co-opted bacteria who even have two cell membranes: One for themselves, and one for the cell they live inside. Chloroplasts are similarly kidnapped bacteria. I don't know if this provides any real clues to how the original eukaryotes came about. There are a multitude of theories, from pools of organic sludge (less likely) to fractures throughout mica at about the width of a cell wall serving as a breeding ground for cell parts and eventually escaping cells thirsty for the world of resources outside (slightly more likely?). Regardless, it's the best solution we have now. (No way to know time scale for sure, < 4 billion years)

#6: Eventually those single cells learned a new trick. In the book 'Freedom Evolves', Daniel Dennett talks about how the great sequoia trees suffered because they lacked cooperation: The trees expand enormous amounts of energy to push themselves up and over the forest canopy because if they don't... their effective brothers and sisters will bury them from sunshine. If all the trees just agreed to spread out right on the ground, and cooperate, they'd be able to harvest much more energy and push more energy into reproducing, but they struggle against each other in competition. Multicellular organisms found a great trick: A small set of cells working to accomplish something, completely unaware of what they were doing but just not killing each other, were able to thrive better than the individual cells struggling like the mighty sequoias. This brought forth two great changes in the world: One, the idea of cooperating for mutual benefit and two, the idea of masquerading as a cooperator for your benefit over the others. Obviously, the cooperators provide something for each other for the exchange to be useful, so anyone who can fake being a cooperator without actually providing got stuff for free and hurt the entire group of cooperators. Thus cooperating groups had very strong pressure to weed out imposters while cementing cooperation within their ranks. (Unknown, somewhere >600 million and something less than 2 billion??)

#7: This multicellular behavior eventually gave way to more and more complex behaviors, specializing groups of cells for particular functions as they became useful or not. These sensor-related actions became actual data processing instead of just pure triggers. Correlating the outside state with the inside state became the most relevant skill, and doing is quickly became more important than doing it accurately. Animals err on the side of caution: It's one of the reasons we're apt to see a face in a random pile of things in the dark, or in trees, or really anywhere with vertical symmetry. These things alarm us, sending out warning signals and actually make us turn our necks and look at them. Our bodies on a primal level want to know, is this a friend, a foe, a mate, or food?, erroring toward 'foe'. We have many leftovers from this step in the process, like if someone throws a brick at your head, you are apt to duck under it. Dennett said in "Consciousness Explained": We are descended from the people that ducked, not the people who stood there and took the brick to the face. Gathering a catalog of these behaviors was useful to survival, so creatures would amass more and more, but they were somewhat restricted by their biology. A already developed creature can only pack so much brain tissue in a skull: Other genetic facts might make increasing skull size a dangerous predisposition, so you run a line where intelligence is not more valuable than size, skill, teeth, fangs, or whatever else you might have. (<538 million year ago or so)

#8: Social organization continued to be a winning algorithim not just within cells but within groups of the same creature: Social creatures who could work together as a group were able to thrive in ways that they couldn't on their own. Similar precepts applied: If you could trick a group into helping you without helping them, you benefited more, but this powered an arms race for increasingly better ways to detect the 'defectors'. I think this is at least partly responsible for a lot of our blusterful, irrational seeming posturing and emotionally charged marketing/politics/etc. A perfectly logical, rational entity has no real vested interest in the group as a whole: While it makes sense for you to benefit from them, you should never sacrifice yourself in favor of the group. This comes back in the 'prisoner's dilemma' scenario. (The prisoner's dilemma is a simple game where you have two players, guilty of a crime, are captured. They both are offered a plea bargain: If they tell on their friend, they will get a reduced sentence. If neither of them say anything, they stay for a small amount of time but the cops don't have enough evidence to stick it to them for good. If one tells and not the other, then the one who didn't tell goes free while the one told on gets a huge amount of time. If both tell, both suffer. The more you are sure that your friend will cooperate, the more trustworthy and good he is, the more motivation you have to betray him: And vice versa. Logically, the only answer is to defect every time, and tell on your friend: But this strategy results in massive losses compared to cooperating with your friend every time.) I think this is what makes people mistrusting of people who are too rational or too logical about things. People don't want to see reasonable devotion to a cause, they want to see fanatical devotion, so they know beyond a shadow of the doubt that that person is for real, not a defector trying to get in for the benefits of the other cooperators.

#9: As we currently guess, we're descended from some common ancestor between us and apes: This is no big shocker. We already mentioned that we share a common ancestor with every other animal on the planet: You and the seqouias are distant cousins. You and your pet cat are distant cousins. This is not a metaphor or a folksy statement about togetherness: Your great, great, great, great, great, great, great (repeat many, many times) grandmother was the same person as your cat's great great great (repeat many, many more times) grandmother. At one point, there was a set of children, and one group went one way, and the other went the other way. Isolation seems to be the most common factor in these things: Groups getting cut off from each other, like chimpanzees and bonobos. This is where things get very interesting. 5 to 7 million years ago, we split off from our last grandmother shared with those chimpanzees & bonobos. This was interesting because we came out of the forests and into the plains, and the skills and groups that had served us well in the jungles stopped serving us so well. This caused some interesting selection pressure. The theory that I think explains the most relates to the behavior of adult chimps today: Male adult chimps kill each other, and cannot exist in large numbers with each other. The society is pretty vicious. Adolescent chimps don't do this. Some folks think that this caused selection pressure to push our own maturation downwards much like the axolotl's was. There's a lot of evidence for this: We have less hair, our bone structure matches larger adolescent chimpanzees much better than adult chimpanzees, chimp brains grow to maturity in about a year while ours take twenty, we get our teeth very late. But the push towards neoteny also added a crucial element: Our heads got way big. This gave lots of room for development over the next 4-6 million years.

#10: The most important element in our society at that time became each other. With the adult anger of the chimps muted in the adolescent archaic humans, we grew larger and larger groups and before long the most meaningful thing any of them had to interact with was each other. This from an already social animal means lots of brain space is built for interacting with other creatures just like the one it already was, even if that connection wasn't made yet. As brain size increased, and the number of good tricks increased, the brain increasingly had to discover how to rewire itself to understand the most dynamic thing around it: The other people with the group. It became a useful trick in itself to treat EVERYTHING as if it was alive: Observe it for action when poked, be careful and mindful of it, be sure not to make any quick moves before you know what it is or what it isn't. This and the extensive development of reworkable paths to deal with each other was rapidly building towards the infrastructure required for sentience as we understand it. (Unsure, probably 4-6 million years ago)

#11: A variety of useful behaviors were pushed rapidly throughout the genome of the species because they were phenomenally good tricks. This is known as the Baldwin effect, and is somewhat controversial. The example in Ch. 7 of 'Consciousness Explained' that really sparks my interest is the 'talking to yourself' trick that I have referenced here many times. A social creature is built to respond to a cry for help with an appropriate response and built to sound the cry for help when in trouble; One day it calls for help and it hears itself call, and is able to access that trick for help rapidly. This is such a good trick, anyone who couldn't do it dies off or just isn't as successful reproducing. Later, that virtual, sound-based wire in the brain becomes an actual wiring, with those closer and closer to it being better and better at concealing plans and faster and faster at 'communicating with themselves'. It's possible these behaviors were selected via different mechanisms and other behaviors just passed through via social learning, of course. (~150,000 years to ~900,000 years)

#12: For some reason, from 150,000 years to 75,000 years ago, a huge number of our ancestors died. We were lowered into an extremely small breeding pool, so small that there is much more variation from chimp to chimp than from any human alive today to any other human alive today. Lots of potential explanations here, most commonly the Ice Age. This may have served as an actual death blow to those whose brains weren't plastic enough to adapt. (~75,000 years ago).

#13: This is where we come alive. It's no exact point, really: It's highly doubtful there is any particular human that just woke up and suddenly was sentient. It was probably a very gradual process, building up to it over many of the last stages. The application of those complex, variable, plastic social nodes in the brain had to continually refine themselves with the available room in the head and the changing and developing people around it. People became much more complex than any other behavior they might find in nature, and as the understanding of people sharpened the understanding of objects around them sharpened to. But all was still meaningless until the great study of the creatures around them resulted in an amazing leap of deduction, perhaps the most amazing:

I am one of these creatures I live with.

Sure, it doesn't sound much outloud right there, but it is an amazing thing. This was the formation of the I; A theory of mind, something a few animals possess but none use so deftly like we do. A snowball of self-reference later, they were able to apply lessons learned about their own society to themselves and then to objects around them. Ideas and concepts bloomed for the first time ever. Nature had produced this thing that could even understand what nature was. It would not understand what nature was for a long, long time.

#14: This also marks the point where we are effectively genetically fixed: The society you were born into became much more relevant than many genetic factors in determining if you were going to reproduce or not. It was still very important to be strong and smart, but nowhere near as important as it was for most creatures. You had groups that could pass down secrets and tricks from generation to generation in an unlimited fashion. It is kind of like today: If the greatest genius as far as natural talent is born in the DPRC and conscripted into a child army, he or she's probably not going have the chance to reach his talent and probably end up being significantly less knowledgeable and intelligent than a moderately intelligent person born into a family that focused on education and values that promote education. As far as we can tell genetically we're the same kinds of animals now that we were back then. Sure, there are some minor variations: Disease resistance like malaria, lactose tolerance, other very small variations, but we've distanced ourselves from the evolutionary algorithm, and that's a good thing. Evolution is cruel, and we are the first beings capable of being fully aware of our own suffering in the context of our present, past and future. (~74000 years ago to ~150000 years ago, depending on who you ask)

#15: About here is where we had an explosion of ideas. Things rapidly got really out of hand with this whole idea business. The ideas got better and more powerful and more impressive, from farming to mathematics to religions and rudimentary 'science'. Ideas were the new traits. This is the foundation of what is called 'meme theory', a kind of occult sect of information theory that deals with the transmission of ideas through brains. This 25 questions thing is described as a 'meme' or an 'internet meme'; This is because it is a concept that is spread from person to person, and it does so in the same manner that we use to spread chain letters in high school: Give this to 25 other people. Many of the most successful memes in history have similar precepts, from just go tell everyone you can about this like the 'religion' meme in many cases to 'education' which rapidly promotes the scanning and reception of all kinds of new memes.

#16: This has some relevant facts for us today: Our brains stopped evolving many thousands of years ago, even though we have developed new ideas to reprogram them with constantly to this day. This means a lot of our behaviors are still influenced by our heritage in this regards. One example I bring up a lot is 'Dunbar's Number', a sort of sociological/anatomical guessing game some scientists played way back when to determine the optimal group size for any given ape after looking at their brain. Human maximum group size is about 150 or so, so what that means for you is that when you get much past that number, it's difficult to really care about those people. This is why you care less about New Orleans victims than you do if your neighbor is killed, and you care even less about tsunami victims all the way across the world than New Orleans victims. The less culturally relevant it is to you, the less close to home it is to you, the less you care. This causes friction in our society where every day we're having to interact with more and more people every day, crammed into a small area. The answer, though, isn't to abandon the idea of having more than 150 in a place. It's true that this is the same mechanism that lets non-sociopath criminals rationalize their actions. But still, the way to fix problems like this is the same application of ideas that got us out of so many messes before. (Present)

#17: Religion is another big one. Religion, nationalism, and a lot of other similar things generally operate on the idea that you are somehow superior due to factors entirely beyond your control: Because you happened to be born in the 'greatest country on earth' or you happened to be born into a family that had the correct religion out of the millions of them. This was very useful for our ancient ancestors, I think. You have a way to do whatever you want in the name of your group, and not have to deal with the repercussions of that behavior at home. You can go and steal from some group of people weaker than you, and not have to deal with strongest guy at home going, "Well, hey... If it's okay for me to do it out there, how come I can't do it here?" Easy! You're a chosen one. Those people are infidels. Or just jerks for being in the next country over, what is it with those guys? Or their skin is the wrong color, and you have the right one. Whatever floats your boat, it was a convenient mechanism for every-group-for-themselves free-for-alls, even just on a resource competition level rather than all out warfare. (Present)

#18: Sex and discrimination continue to be an awful problem, for probably as long as people had ideas at all. It is a fact that the highest performing males in any given sports event generally outperform the highest performing females, but the median covers a huge range that most people fall in, man or woman. Its even less relevant than that: Our minds, who we really are, is built up entirely in our brain. Various hormones effect brain development, but the venn diagrams involved here are really not that variant. Various gender hegemonies exist because people reinforce them happily, generation after generation, which causes all of our kind to suffer each time the next potential Feynmann is shooed away from math because she's a girl.

#19: That's an interesting point ontop of it: The mind is a part of the body, even if the illusion is that it owns the body, your body. Originally the brain was just a defense mechanism, in the same vein as fangs on a snake, armor on a armadillo. When it grew a mind, something strange happened that hijacked the genetic evolution of our bodies forever, but that doesn't mean we didn't come from being slaves to bodies that reproduced for no reason other than to use the energy around us better and faster than the competing organisms. That was the one solid line of programming that kept us alive for so many billions of years: Mindless fecundity. We're still programmed to absolutely reproduce like rabbits. Everybody likes sex though from an idea perspective, but how much of that comes from your body's slavish imperatives and how much of that comes from your mind's perogative?

#20: Another way in which our bodies betray us is age. There was no genetic imperative to keep a creature alive much past its part was done in making sure there were grandkids, so our maintenance system was not groomed for keeping us up and running after that level. Our bones wear out pretty easy, our S-shape spine keeps us doomed for back problems due to our walking upright. Cancer seems almost inevitable over large spans of time: How do you convince cells that have been reproducing continuously for 3.4 billion years to just stop? (That's an interesting aside. You have to remember, you come from the sex line of cells that have been continually reproducing since the dawn of life. Somatic cells don't ever go on to reproduce more, erm, you. It's just your sex cells that get to reproduce. So a continually dividing set of those (and their predesscesors) since the dawn of life, that's the journey you've taken to get here.)

#21: We're programmed for limitless sugar consumption because those energy sources were very rare in ancient times and it was a survival necessity to consume as much of it as you could: Now, we can produce gigantic piles of white sugar, more than you can possibly consume without dying. Our sweet tooth hasn't changed with our diet.

#22: Our brains seem ill-equipped to deal with this overflow of information we're generating. People don't seem able to process it fast enough, to advance on it fast enough, to figure out the true from the false, get to the bottom of things, or whatever other cliches you want to drag out for explaining this. If you've made it this far, I'm impressed, but you'll surely agree this is a lot to digest in one sitting. And most people's response, when looking at a vision of our travel from the very birth of life to now is simply boredom (staggering to me, how could they possibly be bored?). I hope I'm wrong on this one. It's probably just my impatience and underestimation of the human race, but I can't shake the suspicion that our overload of memes is causing a lot of social problems. The ability to find any information in seconds seems sometimes to be a great boon, other times to be awfully damaging. As I mentioned in another post, crazy cult leaders, skinheads, and racists use to have to work to find their shared contacts in the community: Now they can make a message board and just wait for them to all round themselves up. People seem desperate for adversary and absolutely detest reason and logic.

#23: To take a step back, language was the single greatest invention that I entirely glossed over in my first description. The mystery and grandeur of language may very well be responsible for how we organize our brains in such an effective manner. Memory seems tagged on words, at least in my case, so each word you tug is like pulling on a tag that unrolls the other words, descriptors, symbols, and eventually vivid images in my brain where I can pull out the details. The interesting thing in the language-memory storage system like that is that you can mismatch symbols: I remember once a very vivid memory I was recalling before I realized that I must be recalling it in the wrong 'living room': I was thinking of my old house in Charlotte while the memory definitely took place in Pennsylvania. I thought it illustrative of the kind of errors memory has all the time, but also of the inherent compression language gives us: You tag these words together, somehow, and the brain, using the same mechanisms it uses to process the scenery originally, unfolds the tags into the scene. Language may be responsible for that mechanism even existing at all. I know I don't remember very well from before I acquired language. After that, reading/writing would be one of the greatest inventions. This was interesting because while the brain will acquire language just by being around people speaking, reading and writing is a completely aftermarket neural implant: It has to be painstakingly installed in every person you want to be able to read and write, and it drastically increases their capability, their intelligence.

#24: Most of our internal uses of our senses seem to use the exact same mechanisms as the external uses of our senses, fired in reverse: Imagining an image of a ball uses the same parts of the brain as seeing a ball, just in reverse, for example. Hearing, remembering a tune: These self-referential relationships support the hypothesis that the systems to deal with others within our group were co-opted and modified to deal with ourselves, to two-way streets we can utilize for both internal stimuli and external stimuli.

#25: Despite all these flaws I've mentioned in the last bit, we remain the most amazing, remarkable thing I have ever seen. Our triumphs far outweigh our difficulties so far, but the greatest difficulties may lie ahead. We move forward with our knowledge and technology, as we did thousands of years ago, but now our technology moves faster every day. Our ancient brains and developing minds remain highly subjective, prone to irrational decision making, practically dedicated to making unfortunate alliances, and as our capabilities advance with our knowledge our personal power increases as well. A few people with some box cutters and a awful idea were able to alter the course of this country's history a few years ago. Many other suprising are more subtle, and possibly even more far reaching. A good example in that: The Haber-Bosch process detonated the population explosion, allowing previously desolate land to be turned into farmland and food to be grown for a rapid expansion of population -- and led to the deaths of millions with easily produced munitions for world wars.

We approach a world where any individual human, empowered with education, understanding, and this very human sapience, could do great damage or great good at will. That world is already here, to a degree, just every day we grow it with new capabilities, new ideas, new methods and more knowledge. This does not mean all hope is lost to the careless destruction of the least responsible elements of society. The way our mind is shaped by ideas gives us power over the flaws, and perhaps this ancient engine forged genetic bit by bit to discern the world around it is powerful enough to see us through. But this is no passive process, the things we do with our minds alone to drive us. We need to all become more responsible, more reasonable, and better educated. We need all people to grow with willpower, intelligence, and character, into people who can live up to the legacy our ancestors have paid for time and time again in blood and decay. We need people who think not just about the now, but the future; And not just tomorrow, but the indefinite frontier. We are our own greatest enemy and our own greatest asset; It is only through our decisions that we succeed or fail.

Goodnight, all.

(Sigh, that is too long to proofread at 1:58 AM. Maybe I can proofread it tomorrow. You guys can test the first draft, I'll send the final to facebook once its done.)

Conservapedia

2009-01-27T07:45:01Z

Human reproduction serves to create new human beings and with these human beings comes a soul. The soul appears with the person at the moment of conception, making him a complete human being from the very start. This is why abortion is considered murder: the abortionist has rent the soul from a living human body, the soul being the source of a full life for human beings. If there was no soul present in the human at the time of conception and it entered the body at some later stage, then until that moment the fetus would hypothetically be nothing more than an animated body, similar to how animals and plants are alive but without souls. Thus, if this were the case, abortion would not be murder, but rather a termination of a non-human entity, at least until the soul finally joined the body. However, there is no evidence that the soul can enter the body at any time later than conception. Since the soul is intrinsic to human beings, it absolutely must be present at conception and therefore abortion is murder.

Human Reproduction, Conservapedia

Conservapedia is the conservative point of view Wikipedia. Calling it that is an insult really. Conservapedia says that wikipedia is far too liberal in its point of view, but really wikipedia's entire structure is focused on looking at all things at a neutral, non-partisan, NPOV: The cornerstone of wikipedia, it essentially allows any contestable statement that takes a position on a statement rather than just relays the facts, and even that can be shown to be violations of the NPOV. Any NPOV occurrence can be flagged and will get examined seriously.

Conservapedia is response to the NPOV, essentially: It thinks neutral points of view do not reflect reality, with reality actually being more conservative. Here are 3 of the rules from conservapedia that kind of demonstrate their style somewhat:

8. We do not attempt to be neutral to all points of view. We are neutral to the facts. If a group is a terrorist group, then we use the label "terrorist" but Wikipedia will use the "neutral" term "militant".
9. We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.
10. We allow original, properly labeled works, while Wikipedia does not. This promotes a more intellectual atmosphere on Conservapedia. On Wikipedia, observations based on personal experience and interviews have been dismissed as "original research". Here, we do not restrict research for articles in that manner.

It's... infuriating is not a suitable word, really, it's just spreading damnable lies to people. This is a great example in response to the idea of human sexuality at all. This was on the talk page, outside of view of the average visiting netizen:

>add something benign, perhaps along the lines of:
Sexual intercourse is the mechanism by which human beings mate and produce offspring. The Penis enters the Vagina, the male's sperm fertilises the female's egg, and the child forms in the womb. There can hardly be the slightest objection to something as simple as that, a matter-of-fact description for children of how we all came to be.

>I anticipate plenty of objection. For a start, tell a child or young teenager how, and they might want to try it. It also means we have to make articles on mate, penis and virgina, tripling the contriversy. Here's an idea: Disappear the lot. Delete the page, prevent it ever being created again. Do the same for everything that deals with human sexuality

An encyclopedia that just wants to BLACK OUT any mention of sexuality. It's amazing.

Anyway, my main beef is their article on evolution. Perhaps no other article makes its bias more clearly known. It lists every single backwoods forum argument people give against evolution, and talks about public opinion on whether or not evolution is true like that is some solid indicator of its truth. It lists a handful of particular things that sound suspicious that aren't really, or casts aspersions on Darwin and evolutionary scientists or notes particularly unethical scientists and presents them like they prove that evolution is fault. It lists absolutely zero facts that support evolution, despite the hundreds of thousands of them available.

And a while back, they got into an argument with one of the scientists behind the experiments that led to a bacteria evolving a capability to metabolize citrate.. A common conservative POV chestnut about evolution was that evolution has only been observed reducing a genome rather than increasing it -- something that could only be done by an 'intelligent designer' or 'some other unexplained process'. (They're never very vague about who this intelligent designer might be.) Lenski's bacteria did indeed increase their genome and develop a new mechanism: The ability to process citrate.

I would say that find is a nail in the coffin for creationism, but I mean, we're not even at that stage. The mouth has been stuffed with garlic and the head cut off, the body burnt, the head thrown in the coffin and nailed shut, and buried under twenty feet of poured reinforced structural concrete more years ago. Every day, more things come by that confirm the theory of evolution, and nothing that refutes it. Evolution by natural selection is as close of a fact as gravity is or the expansion of gas in a cylinder. Even a comment in that SLOG article, the poster says, 'If it takes decades just to develop a single major change, how long would it possibly take to develop a whole organism?'. Very long indeed: But we have a few billion years to work with. 500 similar complex changes could occur in just 10,000,000 years: A practical hop-skip-and-a-jump by geological time scales.

The people who write this anti-evolution stuff must be well aware that evolution is true. To look at the evidence is to know it's true: There's just no denying it, no pretending it is a gigantic deception. And they make the choice that the deception is better for people than the alternative, and go ahead with it, set out actively to mine evolution for any particular point that would sound good on paper and stick in people's minds: The wedge strategy, to convince the uneducated and force the issue onto the public scene. These people are literally destroying the education of millions. They are like anti-teachers.

And they have the... audacity to sit there on their front page and brag about a journal's comment that:

"The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year."

I don't know what we are supposed to do in response to people like this. In Guy Harrison's 50 Reasons book, he mentions that people who think evolution isn't true don't need debates, they need education. He says if somebody told it to him in his house, he'd just point to the cro magnon, neanderthal, and other replica skulls he has on his shelf and say, 'Well, then, I wonder who those guys were?'

I agree with him to a point -- the individual people contaminated by the wedge strategy don't need debates, they need education, education they've been told is being waged by biased scientists who want to push their agenda and drown the truth. (What self-respecting scientist could really want to drown the truth on something, to inhibit decades of progress?? Certainly not nearly EVERY intelligent, sane scientist?). Arguments of reason are useless to these people anyway: They have something they just want to believe is true, as much as they want to believe that Obama is going to kill all Christians in the country. It's scary stuff. But the people who are perpetrating this fraud on them, pushing this kind of anti-knowledge on them... It just seems awful, I don't know what to make of it. I am sure they think they are doing the right thing, but I can't imagine how so many could adopt a mindset like that. It makes my skin crawl.

A Dwarf's life

2009-01-19T09:57:14Z

A dwarf's life is a hard one. I have started a new fort on Dwarf Fortress, this time with some hand crafted scripts to automatically manage some of the more complicated tasks I set about the previous encounter. My old for was randomly named 'Beachbells'. You can actually look through it there. This new one, I am aiming for fixing all the mistakes I made in the creation of Beachbells. The name is 'Stukoskegeth Dumed Berin', which means, 'Razorhold the Fortress of Artifice', a significantly better name than 'Beachbells'. This is all handled through the games in-game language system, which has syllables that mean words on different terms like, as an adjective, as an end of a word, etc.

Anyway, the two events that surprised me so far in this fortress:

I had a dwarf, Kosoth Enjoyedfloor (in translation), who was a mason in my fortress. I was replacing the naturally hewn stairs with constructed block stairs, and he tripped and fell down the stairs. Because I don't stagger my stairways, he fell straight down to the bottom of the fortress: 20 floors. The game adds force per square you fall, so he basically hit the gruound and exploded. Anyway, I was just engraving tiles for decoration, and I noticed poor old Kosoth:

'Engraved on the floor is an exceptionally designed image of Kosoth Enjoyedfloor the dwarf by Ustuth Saeklor. Kosoth enjoyedfloor is falling. The artwork relates to the collision of the dwarf Kosoth Enjoyedfloor with an obstacle in Razorhold the Fortification of Artifice in the midwinter of 301.'

The other interesting thing was, I built my noble quarters first, then closed it off with some doors. Nobles don't come for a while in-game, but you need special space for them so it's wise to carve out some areas. Anyway, I got my first noble, so I went to check on the space... and found it was full of spider webs. What game has that level of detail?? I was very impressed. Dwarf Fortress continues to surprise me.

more game stuff

2009-01-16T04:10:45Z

Evolutionary algorithms continue to fascinate me. I have been thinking about their application in gaming and procedural content generation. The frustrating thing about most games is that they have numerical values that specify strength, speed, dexterity, mental acuity, etc, and with a system designed like that you can't really make a fitness algorithm. (Well, you can, but it just pushes everything to the maximum values.)

In real life, there is no numerical indicator of 'strength'. The amount of weight a creature can lift is a real value, but its not written into their DNA. What genes give you is a variety of tradeoffs: Different kinds of muscle tissue more suited to certain tasks, like brachiation versus fine motor manipulation. Tradeoffs can be very interesting. Hippos, for instance, are considered to be closest living land mammal to whales. Shockingly, every whale traces its ancestry to a land animal. So in the course of their evolution, ancient ancestors of whales came out of the ocean, developed mechanisms for living on land, and then went back. This is evidenced in a lot of their biology, but with hippos it's very clear. Basically they ceased to need all that structure for supporting their weight out of water: A constraint removed, they were able to expand enormously, taking advantage of their land-developed systems within the aquatic biome.

This kind of wonderful and unexpected diversity is absolutely everywhere in nature. There are a couple dozen different kinds of eyes, thousands of methods of locomotion. This kind of 'content' is fascinating and there should be some kind of 'game' to demonstrate it.

The simplest kind of gross 'mutations' brought about by variation in a genome is the addition or subtraction of modular gene elements. This isn't the simple, error-prone addition or subtraction of dna basepairs themselves but addition or subtraction in the 'construction routine' of the creature. Segmentation is most evident in types of worms, but you can see it everywhere in multicellular creatures: Our spine is a great example, a repeated, connected cord of incredibly similar segments, fine-tuned throughout our history, to adjust each module to the size that proved most advantageous for the creation of grandchildren.

Embryological development makes it obvious how these things happen, but how do we take advantage of this kind of thing in a video game? I don't know. DNA seems like such a robust system -- to say nothing of the proteins it generates. Proteins seem capable of about anything. I suppose a rudimentary game would have to simulate things on that level: Block by block, amino acid by amino acid. That's simply computationally unfeasible, an N-body simulation that gets more drawn out every moment. Back to the old chestnut of trying to find a system still simple enough for interesting effects but not too complicated to simulate, I guess.

whoo!

2009-01-10T07:34:22Z

I just restrung, and tuned (and retuned a few times) my guitar with alchemy medium weight strings. And this is the best it has ever sounded.

I love right after you string a guitar and after that adjustment period for the strings when they're so bright and wonderful sounding. It seems to go away really fast, but for a while there...

The fourth string broke the last time I changed strings, so I was using the old string. That fourth string was like 3 years old, and it was messed up on the tuning knob so it would creak and never stay in tune. It's so wonderful that they're all perfect now, little descending coils with no overlap. I guess I finally know how to string a guitar. ; P

conspiracy theorists

2009-01-09T09:39:04Z

I spent a large portion of a day last week arguing with an old acquaintance about the existence of aliens on earth.

Conspiracies theories are some of the saddest things. Basically, the root of every conspiracy theory is a strong doubt of all circulated information -- A hypothesis that a powerful entity could carefully edit and rearrange every possible source of information as to keep things from particular people or the public at large. This is sad because it convinces otherwise smart people that no evidence is reliable, and somehow convinces them that some insane things without evidence must be true. Most conspiracy theorists seem pretty smart -- it's a shame that these people get caught up in the crazy.

In real life, conspiracies are pretty damn hard to maintain. You can have them, for sure. They have existed. But the more important the conspiracy, the harder it is to keep secret. Each person you add to the conspiracy, adds more difficulty to it too. Ben Franklin is attributed with the quote, 'Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.' This principle ends up being really freaking true in real life. People who can keep a secret are rare if non-existent. An entire group of people all stumbling across the same secret and all of them being able to keep it forever, no matter how important the secret was?

The kicker is that most of the big conspiracy theories involve enormous numbers of people on the side of the conspirators. Chemtrails is the huge one: The idea that planes are dropping chemicals on America in order to mind-control us. Yes, people actually believe this. Skeptical Inquirer has a good article detailing just how fervent these people are. This would require letting hundreds of thousands of pilots in on the secret, air traffic controllers, all the men and women required to service and maintain the sprayers, transport technicians, chemical producers, manufacturers, shippers... Conspiracy theorists just don't understand the logistics of these sorts of things. If chemtrails were real, you'd have at least some of the chemtrail people wail: The less important they are to the chemtrail conspiracy, the more appealing whistleblowing would be. They could be millionaires, or martyrs, and that appeals to many people -- certainly at least a couple people in a ten-thousand-person conspiracy.

This friend I was arguing with was in the Navy, and talked about how the ship he was on in the Gulf once locked down, stopped sending messages out and everyone was ordered to maintain complete silence, and ordered to keep all the events that happened on the boat a secret. I asked him, well, now that its years later, what were they up to? And he told me. Totally mundane stuff involving Iran, but he told me. I mean, right there, he demonstrated: 5000 people cannot keep a secret.

The idea that UFOs are here, too, merits extraordinary evidence. His primary 'citation' was youtube videos describing the phenomenon, but for each one he pulled up, I pulled up the Wikipedia article on it: Wikipedia had excellent citations for each, real books that detailed what the phenomenon is explained by more readily than what he claimed. He just claimed 'Well anybody can edit Wikipedia, so I have to go with this video evidence as stronger'. Kind of amusing.

The idea that alien intelligence travelled across the distance between the stars, made it to earth, and then crash-landed anywhere is also equally ridiculous. Any ship that could cross the interstellar void could not possibly be both so poorly constructed and so astronomically lucky as to crash land on earth. It would be far less likely than a trebuchet-launched football, tossed from the end of the reflecting pool in the National Mall, flying and landing and balancing itself perfectly on the top of the Washington Monument. Yet these people seem to think it's just a given.

Sure, such a thing is possible, but as I always repeat, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They point to a huge number of people that come out of the military or have done their own 'investigative' work making their own claims, and say, 'How can these people all be wrong?'... But these people are not saying anything consistent, and at the heart these people are just making more claims -- And to compound matters, they have a lot to gain by saying these things are true, speaking at UFO conventions, money, book sales even generally. It's an entire empire of claims with no evidence. Not a single piece of UFO metal, not a single alien technology, no nice alien corpses to dissect. So it's just more extraordinary claims that require evidence, and still no evidence. When are you supposed to start believing?

I pretty much assume any story someone tells me is a lie until evidence surmounts or the story shows to have no clear benefit to the telling party of the party that told them the story. Some people say this is rather cynical, but assuming it is a lie right off helps you analyze chunks: Does that seem likely? Is there any supporting evidence? I find with every single conspiracy theory involving aliens or mind-control conspiracies, the reality just doesn't match up with the imagination.

Sure, there are conspiracies though. Like the Scientologists trying to take over the IRS. Cabals of assassins planning their dirty work. Stuff like that. But you know what? They generally get caught, and they have a lot less people and a lot less importance than 'extraterrestials have invaded our planet.'

armrha @ 2009-01-09T00:52:00

2009-01-09T09:05:51Z

I made a movie thing with the xtranormal beta. Evelyn thought it was really funny.

The Werewolf God

watchmen!

2009-01-07T09:40:45Z

I got a new copy of Watchmen from my roommate for christmas! I have never actually owned a copy I think, just have helped with the systematic destruction of numerous paperback copies over the course of the years. It is what I consider to be the best comic book out there, though I certainly haven't read them all. It's worth reading, even if you don't like comics. My dad read and liked this comic.

Glancing at top500.org, I see things are still on track for 2009. I'm always reassured by top500.org: People say, every six months or so, "The end is here for Moore's Law.". Eventually, they have to be right. But as long as its here, we see some incredibly gains in processing. But what does that give us exactly?

Raw processing power has to be utilized to produce useful information. Processing, analyzing, calculation, and analysis takes data and turns it into information. There's a lot of controversy about software complexity at the moment, for example in some of Brockman's 'Edge' third culture books at least three essays in the 'Science in the Future' book deal with the topic. The basic controversy is that you have many modern programs, like Microsoft Word, for example, that have over 16 million lines of code, pieced together in an object oriented fashion. This makes any given complex computer program an extremely intricate machine, with billions of 'moving parts', albeit those parts never wear down. The issue stems from the fact that Word isn't perfect, nor is any operating system or any software system on record -- and some of the most reliable computer systems are the simplest and slowest.

Some folks think that because complexity causes problems, we'll run into problems harnessing that increasing computing power for more than just protein folding and prime number factoring. I think the most interesting thing to come from enhanced computing power will be natural selection used to generate software from the ground up: Robot behavior, image recognition, and other patterns built the same way nature built it. This would be a great modification of our software paradigm and I think will help fill the gap and analysis of results will allow for amazing new conduits of design. But anyway... I should get to bed, its really late.